In Progress: Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum
Cover Story, April 2024
On the occasion of their participation in Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney, April’s Cover Story spotlights Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, and The Margins of the Factory, the exhibition of the duo’s work that Latitudes curated in 2014.
At ADN Platform, one of two projects showcased was Work in Progress (2013), which delved into the manufacturing industry of Markina-Xemein, Iratxe’s rural Basque hometown. A video documented the mass production of rubber car parts, tracing the journey from the assembly line of a worker-owned factory to makeshift workspaces where informal workers, including women from Moldova, Peru, and Senegal, finished pieces by hand.
The artists employed several of these workers to cast hundreds of replicas of small modernist sculptures. These replicas were then displayed on mass-produced shelving, aiming to evoke the Laboratorio de tizas (Chalk Laboratory) (c. 1972–74) by Jorge Oteiza, the Basque sculptor known for his strong criticism of the commodification of art.
“We have a long-standing interest in the image of ‘work’, and in the relation between art and labour”, the artists explained in a 2013 Frieze interview with Latitudes’ Max Andrews. And turning Oteiza’s experimental sculpture laboratory into a contemporary production line “allowed us to stage an image of the artist at work, and to superimpose it onto that of the wage-worker, ultimately presenting both as ideologically loaded social constructions.”
In 2018 Work in Progress was acquired by the collection of Artium Museoa, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country.
In Sydney, Iratxe & Klaas are showing a new rendition of False Flag (2021), their series of sculptures that draw inspiration from René Magritte’s surrealist warplanes of 1937 and the legacy of the Guernica bombardment. The Biennale runs until 10 June 2024.
At ADN Platform, one of two projects showcased was Work in Progress (2013), which delved into the manufacturing industry of Markina-Xemein, Iratxe’s rural Basque hometown. A video documented the mass production of rubber car parts, tracing the journey from the assembly line of a worker-owned factory to makeshift workspaces where informal workers, including women from Moldova, Peru, and Senegal, finished pieces by hand.
The artists employed several of these workers to cast hundreds of replicas of small modernist sculptures. These replicas were then displayed on mass-produced shelving, aiming to evoke the Laboratorio de tizas (Chalk Laboratory) (c. 1972–74) by Jorge Oteiza, the Basque sculptor known for his strong criticism of the commodification of art.
“We have a long-standing interest in the image of ‘work’, and in the relation between art and labour”, the artists explained in a 2013 Frieze interview with Latitudes’ Max Andrews. And turning Oteiza’s experimental sculpture laboratory into a contemporary production line “allowed us to stage an image of the artist at work, and to superimpose it onto that of the wage-worker, ultimately presenting both as ideologically loaded social constructions.”
In 2018 Work in Progress was acquired by the collection of Artium Museoa, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country.
In Sydney, Iratxe & Klaas are showing a new rendition of False Flag (2021), their series of sculptures that draw inspiration from René Magritte’s surrealist warplanes of 1937 and the legacy of the Guernica bombardment. The Biennale runs until 10 June 2024.
- COVER STORY, APRIL 2024
In Progress: Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum
Cover Story, April 2024
Archivo de portadasOn the occasion of their participation in Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney, April’s Cover Story spotlights Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, and The Margins of the Factory, the exhibition of the duo’s work that Latitudes curated in 2014.
At ADN Platform, one of two projects showcased was Work in Progress (2013), which delved into the manufacturing industry of Markina-Xemein, Iratxe’s rural Basque hometown. A video documented the mass production of rubber car parts, tracing the journey from the assembly line of a worker-owned factory to makeshift workspaces where informal workers, including women from Moldova, Peru, and Senegal, finished pieces by hand.
The artists employed several of these workers to cast hundreds of replicas of small modernist sculptures. These replicas were then displayed on mass-produced shelving, aiming to evoke the Laboratorio de tizas (Chalk Laboratory) (c. 1972–74) by Jorge Oteiza, the Basque sculptor known for his strong criticism of the commodification of art.
“We have a long-standing interest in the image of ‘work’, and in the relation between art and labour”, the artists explained in a 2013 Frieze interview with Latitudes’ Max Andrews. And turning Oteiza’s experimental sculpture laboratory into a contemporary production line “allowed us to stage an image of the artist at work, and to superimpose it onto that of the wage-worker, ultimately presenting both as ideologically loaded social constructions.”
In 2018 Work in Progress was acquired by the collection of Artium Museoa, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country.
In Sydney, Iratxe & Klaas are showing a new rendition of False Flag (2021), their series of sculptures that draw inspiration from René Magritte’s surrealist warplanes of 1937 and the legacy of the Guernica bombardment. The Biennale runs until 10 June 2024.